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AniBlog Tourney – Round 2 Stats (and a defense)

Since I’ve been tracking them, here are some statistics from the 2nd round (as well as overall) from the AniBlog Tournament:

The second round had 32 matches, 30 of which resulted in an actual vote count (there was one resignation, and the one game with vote manipulation that was canceled). Over those 30 matches, there was a grand total of 7,539 votes cast, which is a 16% increase in votes, despite having 2 fewer vote-counting matches. It comes out to an average of 251.3 votes per match, which is a 24% increase. So far, 14,024 votes have been cast in 62 matches, for an average of 226.2 votes per match, which I think is pretty respectable.

The most voted upon match in the 2nd round was the match between Star Crossed Anime Blog and Just as Planned, in which 671 total votes were cast, which is also the tournament high so far. The top 5 winning vote getting blogs in the 2nd round were Star Crossed Anime Blog (584), Baka-Raptor (334), Hanner’s Anime Blog (318), Kurogane’s Anime Blog (280), and THAT Anime Blog (252). The 5 blogs which received the highest percentage of the vote in their poll was Star Crossed Anime Blog (87%), Sea Slugs! Anime Blog (76%), Kurogane’s Anime Blog (76%), Reverse Thieves (75%), and THAT Anime Blog (75%).

The top 5 closest matches in actual votes were:

Rabbit Poets vs. JanaiBlog (tie)

Mainichi Anime Yume vs. Memories of Eternity (1 vote)

Unmei Kaihen vs. blogSuki (2 votes)

Anime Diet vs. Anime Princess (5 votes)

Hanner’s Anime Blog vs. We Remember Love (6 votes)

Top 5 closest matches in percentage were:

Rabbit Poets vs. JanaiBlog (tie)

Mainichi Anime Yume vs. Memories of Eternity (0.6%)

Unmei Kaihen vs. blogSuki (0.8%)

Hanner’s Anime Blog vs. We Remember Love (1.0%)

Anime Diet vs. Anime Princess (2.8%)

Now, I’m not going to spend too much time responding to 21stcenturydigitalboy’s rant about my blog and my posts about the tournament. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if someone is being serious or just trolling (especially since I am unfamiliar with his overall blogging style), though he certainly sounds serious, going as far as making sure to post a comment with a link to his post onto one of my posts. Most of the things he brings up in his rant I have already addressed varioustimeselsewhere, and I don’t particularly feel like rehashing those things again.

The only things I’ll add are these: Yes, some blogs (such as his) I had never visited before. I do my best evaluation by reading and/or scanning over what appears to be a representative sample of posts – usually 3 or 4 posts – sometimes more if there appears to be a variety of different types of posts – as well as maybe glancing over several more, with the assumption that if I’ve evaluated the quality of writing, etc. on 3 or 4 posts, I can probably assume it holds for most of the other posts.

Now, I’m not going to go counting actual words like how 21stcenturydigitalboy felt compelled to do, but if one blog is writing longer articles than another, then I’ll generally favor the person who writes more if the quality of the content is roughly equal. As for the images – I do consider how one inserts images in one’s post as far as the Post Style category. Generally I don’t care as long as it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the writing or I have to scroll past a million images before I even get to to the post text. However, these factors alone aren’t going to cause me to vote for or against your blog. (Just as design alone won’t, but perhaps 21stcenturydigitalboy mistakes my writing about people’s designs as my making a voting decision based primarily on their design, which I do not unless that is the only thing that really distinguishes the two blogs.)

One also has to make room for the fact that, you know, people have different tastes, and I fully admit that it is impossible for me to completely dispassionately make a review, because the very act of reviewing is dependent on what my tastes are.

As far as whether I win or lose, yes, I pretty much fully expected to lose badly in the 3rd round. I already knew I had no shot against Omo, and if someone beat him, it would stand to reason that I wouldn’t have a shot against whomever beat him. 21stcenturydigitalboy is right, no, I don’t particularly care. If I win, then great, and if not, so what. And yes, I do find it rather sad that he’s taking this tournament, my tournament write ups, my review of his blog (and perhaps the fact that I’ve voted against his blog – twice) so seriously.

I was planning on being courteous towards any opponents I might face in this tournament (which hopefully Chii felt like I was in the last round) but I am very seriously considering not being so considerate this time around. I don’t mind criticism. If you think my reviews of the blogs are BS, fine. If you think I should do it differently, then great. However, 21stcenturydigitalboy’s post, as one of his own tags on his post describes it, is nothing but unproductive, over the top shit talking.

Anyway, I just felt like I should respond to his post. If he was, in fact, posting it in jest, then I apologize for taking it seriously. However, that was definitely not my impression upon reading it.

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9 thoughts on “AniBlog Tourney – Round 2 Stats (and a defense)”

There’s good drama and bad drama associated with the Tourney. I’m sorry about your bad drama. I do, however, LOVE the stats you put up! (I appreciate it as someone who doesn’t get along well with math.) It’s nice to see in factual numbers that more people are participating in the Tourney and hopefully those numbers will keep going up.

No but really, it’s not a matter of if I’m being ‘serious’ or ‘not serious.’ If you mean serious as in ‘getting all mad’, then no I’m not serious. If you mean serious as in ‘not just bullshitting’, then yes, I am serious. I used the tone in that post because, yeah, I’m calling you out. You might not have noticed the tradition among some of the bloggers to do posts bashing on whoever they will be going against in jest, but this is sort of like that. But just because I’m being funny doesn’t mean I’m not being real.

Three or four posts is not enough to get an impression of my blog. I actually have a page right there in the left-hand column called ‘First Time Readers Come Here’ – in there, I have all of my posting types categorized with examples of each. I blog about so many different things that it’s hard to imagine getting any semblance of my blogging style in a short amount of time.

Moreover, both Omo and I are writers who do not write individual articles to be read on their own. We are both personalities. We write with a certain level of assumption that the reader knows us and knows the depth of implications we use in posts. There is a lot from both of us that you can’t really grasp if you don’t know us well enough. My blog is like a story, and every post is an extension of the ones before it – a sort of journey, if you will. It’s not until you develop a certain knowledge of my blog that you will be able to really appreciate it.

Maybe that’s asking too much, and maybe you don’t take the voting seriously enough to go to that trouble, and maybe you won’t like my blog anyway, but your criticism is worthless to me if you don’t even know what I’m trying to do. Criticism is my favorite thing – it is because of the intense criticism that my friends provided (and continue to provide) that I developed my blogging style from really shitty posts into something enjoyable and informative. But it doesn’t mean anything to get that from someone who doesn’t read you and doesn’t understand you in the first place.

I’ll agree that you are entitled to your opinion and taste, but I am also entitled to think that your opinions and tastes suck and bash on you for it, hehe. So don’t feel like I’m really angry or anything, but all of my points are for real. And I really do intend to wipe the floor with you in round 3, by as wide a margin as I can possibly create.

If a reader can’t enjoy your posts even after reading 3-4 of them, then that’s your fault and not the readers. If you’re deliberately making your posts unaprochable to newcomers then that’s quite a legitimate fault with your blog. Do you think a first time reader is going to be enthusiastic and determined enough to trawl through that ‘first time readers go here’ post? You’re expecting your readers to be as dedicated as you are. This won’t happen for a first time reader like Josh is. If he hasn’t gotten a feel for your blog after reading 3-4 posts then that’s something you should honestly take on board

@Josh

I suppose the problem here is that you comment very little, if at all, on the writers personality and writing style. Your posts talk almost exclusively about aesthetics and figures and while that’s interesting in its own right, it gives the impression that you’re just not reading the blogs in question. I know it’s hard to read each and every single one of the blogs competing in the tourney but maybe that’s something you could do for Round 3. You know how each of these blogs work and look after going over them in the previous two rounds.

Well, I have been reading them, but I’ve generally been making judgments like “they write well” or “they seem to have interesting content” and not necessarily getting deeper than that, at least in my write ups. In the later rounds I might need to just to differentiate blogs better.

Part of it is, I guess, maybe a difficulty in exactly being able to describe why or how someone’s content is interesting (or why or how they write well) and part of it is that I’m trying to make the writeup short if I can lol.

I’m not saying people can’t enjoy my blog after 3-4 posts, or can’t understand them. I’m just saying it’s meaningless to make judgements about my blog as a whole if you don’t know enough to grasp it yet. There’s a huge difference between giving first impressions and actually making judgement.

First impressions, however, are the most important thing. The truth is that most people will only bother for 10 seconds on the interwebs. If you can’t capture their attention within that short time span, anything else is just an excuse. You do not ask people to make judgments based on what you decide to be right, people make judgments based on what an usual reader will check, which is the first 4 posts on the front page. As such, it is more meaningful that a first time reader can capture the essence of what your writing philosophy is after the front page. If they can’t, you need to make a re-think of what you wish to portray in the blog. That, to me, is more meaningful than understanding what your whole blog is about, at least on a reader’s perspective. And readers are one of the major reasons why we write.

If Josh is going to judge based on what you say, then he has to cover the various transformations that my blog has evolved for the last 4 years. That’s impractical and silly.